Americanism 


Theodore Roosevelt 

U 


§ 


Address delivered before the 
Knights of Columbus, Carnegie Hall 
Tuesday Evening, October 12, 1915 














Americanism 

Four centuries and a quarter have gone 
by since Columbus by discovering America 
opened the greatest era in world history. 
Four centuries have passed since the Span¬ 
iards began that colonization on the main 
land which has resulted in the growth of 
the nations of Latin-America. Three cen¬ 
turies have passed since, with the settle¬ 
ments on the coasts of Virginia and Mas¬ 
sachusetts, the real history of what is now 
the United States began. All this we ulti¬ 
mately owe to the action of an Italian sea¬ 
man in the service of a Spanish King and 
a Spanish Queen. It is eminently fitting 
that one of the largest and most influential 
social organizations of this great Repub¬ 
lic,—a Republic in which the tongue is 
English, and the blood derived from many 
sources should, in its name commemorate 
the great Italian. It is eminently fitting to 
make an address on Americanism before 
this society. 

DEMOCRATIC PRINCIPLES. 

We of the United States need above all 
things to remember that, while we are by 
blood and culture kin to each of the nations 
of Europe, we are also separate from each 
of them. We are a new and distinct nation¬ 
ality. We are developing our own distinc¬ 
tive culture and civilization, and the worth 
of this civilization will largely depend upon 
our determination to keep it distinctively 
our own. Our sons and daughters should 
be educated here and not abroad. We 
should freely take from every other nation 

i 


whatever we can make of use, but we 
should adopt and develop to our own pe¬ 
culiar needs what we thus take, and never 
be content merely to copy. 

Our nation was founded to perpetuate 
r democratic principles. These principles are 
that each man is to be treated on his worth 
as a man without regard to the land from 
which his forefathers came and without re¬ 
gard to the creed which he professes. If 
the United States proves false to these 
principles of civil and religious liberty, it 
will have inflicted the greatest blow on the 
system of free popular government that has 
ever been inflicted. Here we have had a 
virgin continent on which to try the experi¬ 
ment of making out of divers race stocks a 
new nation and of treating all the citizens 
of that nation in such a fashion as to pre¬ 
serve them equality of opportunity in in¬ 
dustrial, civil and political life. Our duty 
is to secure each man against any injustice 
by his fellows. 

RELIGIOUS FREEDOM. 

One of the most important things to se¬ 
cure for him is the right to hold and to ex¬ 
press the religious views that best meet his 
own soul needs. Any political movement 
directed against any body of our fellow cit¬ 
izens because of their religious creed is a 
grave offense against American principles 
and American institutions. It is a wicked 
thing either to support or to oppose a man 
because of the creed he professes. This 
applies to Jew and Gentile, to Catholic and 
Protestant, and to the man who would be 
regarded as unorthodox by all of them 
alike. Political movements directed against 
men because of their religious belief, and 
intended to prevent men of that creed from 


2 


holding office, have never accomplished 
anything but harm. This was true in the 
days of the “Know-Nothing” and Native- 
American parties in the middle of the last 
century; and it is just as true today. Such a 
movement directly contravenes the spirit of 
the Constitution itself. Washington and 
his associates believed that it was essential 
to the existence of this Republic that there 
should never be any union of Church and 
State; and such union is partially accom¬ 
plished wherever a given creed is aided by 
the State or when any public servant is 
elected or defeated because of his creed. 
The Constitution explicitly forbids the re¬ 
quiring of any religious test as a qualifica¬ 
tion for holding office. To impose such a 
test by popular vote is as bad as to impose 
it by law. To vote either for or against a 
man because of his creed is to impose upon 
him a religious test and is a clear violation 
of the spirit of the Constitution. 

Moreover, it is well to remember that 
these movements never achieve the end they 
nominally have in view. They do nothing 
whatsoever except to increase among the 
men of the various churches the spirit of 
sectarian intolerance which is base and un¬ 
lovely in any civilization but which is ut¬ 
terly revolting among a free people that 
profess the principles we profess. No such 
movement can ever permanently succeed 
here. All that it does is for a decade or 
so to greatly increase the spirit of theolog¬ 
ical animosity, both among the people to 
whom it appeals and among the people 
wnom it assails. Furthermore, it has in the 
past invariably resulted, in so far as it was 
successful at all, in putting unworthy men 
into office; for there is nothing that a man 


3 


of loose principles and of evil practices in 
public life so desires as the chance to dis¬ 
tract attention from his own shortcomings 
and misdeeds by exciting and inflaming the¬ 
ological and sectarian prejudice. 

We must recognize that it is a cardinal 
sin against democracy to support a man for 
public office because he belongs to a given 
creed or to oppose him because he belongs 
to a given creed. It is just as evil as to 
draw the line between class and class, be¬ 
tween occupation and occupation in politi¬ 
cal life. No man who tries to draw either 
line is a good American. True American¬ 
ism demands that we judge each man on 
his conduct, that we so judge him in private 
life and that we so judge him in public life. 
The line of cleavage drawn on principle 
and conduct in public affairs is never in any 
healthy community identical with the line 
of cleavage between creed and creed or be¬ 
tween class and class. On the contrary, 
where the community life is healthy, these 
lines of cleavage almost always run nearly 
at right angles to one another. It is emi¬ 
nently necessary to all of us that we should 
have able and honest public officials in the 
nation, in the city, in the state. If we make 
a serious and resolute effort to get such of¬ 
ficials of the right kind, men who shall not 
only be honest but shall be able and shall 
take the right view of public questions, we 
will find as a matter of fact that the men 
we thus choose will be drawn from the pro¬ 
fessors of every creed and from among 
men who do not adhere to any creed. 

For thirty-five years I have been more or 
less actively engaged in public life, in the 
performance of my political duties, now in 
a public position, now in a private position. 


4 


I have fought with all the fervor I pos¬ 
sessed for the various causes in which with 
all my heart I believed; and in every fight I 
thus made I have had with me and against 
me Catholics, Protestants and Jews. There 
have been times when I have had to make 
the fight for or against some man of each 
creed on grounds of plain public morality, 
unconnected with questions of public pol¬ 
icy. There were other times when I have 
made such a fight for or against a given 
man, not on grounds of public morality, for 
he may have been morally a good man, but 
on account of his attitude on questions of 
public policy, of governmental principle. In 
both cases, I have always found myself 
fighting beside, and fighting against men of 
every creed. The one sure way to have 
secured the defeat of every good principle 
worth fighting for would have been to have 
permitted the fight to be changed into one 
along sectarian lines and inspired by the 
spirit of sectarian bitterness, either for the 
purpose of putting into public life or of 
keeping out of public life the believers in 
any given creed. Such conduct represents 
an assault upon Americanism. The man 
guilty of it is not a good American. 

I hold that in this country there must be 
complete severance of Church and State; 
that public moneys shall not be used for the 
purpose of advancing any particular creed; 
and therefore that the public schools shall 
be non-sectarian. As a necessary corollary 
to this, not only the pupils but the members 
of the teaching force and the school officials 
of all kinds must be treated exactly on a 
par, no matter what their creed; and there 
must be no more discrimination against 
Jew or Catholic or Protestant than discrim- 


6 


ination in favor of Jew, Catholic or Protes¬ 
tant. Whoever makes such discrimination 
is an enemy of the public schools. 

HYPHENATED AMERICANS. 

What is true of creed is no less true of 
nationality. There is no room in this coun¬ 
try for hyphenated Americanism. When I 
refer to hyphenated Americans, I do not re¬ 
fer to naturalized Americans. Some of the 
very best Americans I have ever known 
were naturalized Americans, Americans 
born abroad. But a hyphenated American 
is not an American at all. This is just as 
true of the man who puts “native” before 
the hyphen as of the man who puts German 
or Irish or English or French before the 
hyphen. Americanism is a matter of the 
spirit and of the soul. Our allegiance must 
be purely to the United States. We must 
unsparingly condemn any man who holds 
any ot^r allegiance. But if he is heartily 
and singly loyal to this Republic, then no 
matter where he was born, he is just as 
good an American as anyone else. 

The one absolutely certain way of bring¬ 
ing this nation to ruin, of preventing all 
possibility of its continuing to be a nation 
at all, would be to permit it to become a 
tangle of squabbling nationalities, an intri¬ 
cate knot of German-Americans, Irish- 
Americans, English-Americans, French- 
Americans, Scandinavian-Americans or 
Italian-Americans, each preserving its sep¬ 
arate nationality, each at heart feeling more 
sympathy with Europeans of that national¬ 
ity, than with the other citizens of the Amer¬ 
ican Republic. The men who do not be¬ 
come Americans and nothing else are hy¬ 
phenated Americans; and there ought to be 


no room for them in this country. The man 
who calls himself an American citizen and 
who yet shows by his actions that he is 
primarily the citizen of a foreign land, plays 
a thoroughly mischievous part in the life of 
our body politic. He has no place here; 
and the sooner he returns to the land to 
which he feels his real heart-allegiance, the 
better it will be for every good American. 
There is no such thing as a hyphenated 
American who is a good American. The 
only man who is a good American is the 
man who is an American and nothing else. 

I appeal to history. Among the generals 
of Washington in the Revolutionary War 
were Greene, Putnam and Lee, who were 
of English descent; Wayne and Sullivan, 
who were of Irish descent; Marion, who 
was of French descent; Schuyler, who was 
of Dutch descent, and Muhlenberg and 
Herkemer, who were of German descent. 
But they were all of them Americans and 
nothing else, just as much as Washington. 
Carroll of Carrollton was a Catholic; Han¬ 
cock a Protestant; Jefferson was heterodox 
from the standpoint of any orthodox creed; 
but these and all the other signers of the 
Declaration of Independence stood on an 
equality of duty and right and liberty, as 
Americans and nothing else. 

So it was in the Civil War. Farragut’s 
father was born in Spain and Sheridan’s 
father in Ireland; Sherman and Thomas 
were of English and Custer of German 
descent; and Grant came of a long line of 
American ancestors whose original home 
had been Scotland. But the Admiral was 
not a Spanish-American; and the Generals 
were not Scotch-Americans or Irish- 
Americans or English-Americans or Ger- 


man-Americans. They were all Americans 
and nothing else. This was just as true of 
Lee and of Stonewall Jackson and of Beau¬ 
regard. 

When in 1909 our battlefleet returned 
from its. voyage around the world, Ad¬ 
mirals Wainwright and Schroeder repre¬ 
sented the best traditions and the most 
effective action in our navy; one was of old 
American blood and of English descent; the 
other was the son of German immigrants. 
But one was not a native-American and the 
other a German-American. Each was an 
American pure and simple. Each bore al¬ 
legiance only to the flag of the United 
States. Each would have been incapable of 
considering the interests of Germany or of 
England or of any other country except the 
United States. 

To take charge of the most important 
work under my administration, the building 
of the Panama Canal, I chose General 
Goethals. Both of his parents were born in 
Holland. But he was just plain United 
States. He wasn’t a Dutch-American; if 
he had been I wouldn’t have appointed him. 
So it was with such men, among those who 
served under me, as Admiral Osterhaus and 
General Barry. The father of one was born 
in Germany, the father of the other in Ire¬ 
land. But they were both Americans, pure 
and simple, and first rate fighting men in 
addition. 

In my Cabinet at the time there were men 
of English and French, German, Irish and 
Dutch blood, men born on this side and men 
born in Germany and Scotland; but they 
were all Americans and nothing else; and 
every one of them was incapable of think¬ 
ing of himself or of his fellow-countrymen, 


s 


excepting in terms of American citizenship. 
If any one of them had anything in the na¬ 
ture of a dual or divided allegiance in his 
soul, he never would have been appointed to 
serve under me, and he would have been 
instantly removed when the discovery was 
made. There wasn’t one of them who was 
capable of desiring that the policy of the 
United States should be shaped with refer¬ 
ence to the interests of any foreign country 
or with consideration for anything, outside 
of the general welfare of humanity, save 
the honor and interest of the United States, 
and each was incapable of making any dis¬ 
crimination whatsoever among the citizens 
of the country he served, of our common 
country, save discrimination based on con¬ 
duct and on conduct alone. 

For an American citizen to vote as a Ger- 
man-American, an Irish-American or an 
English-American is to be a traitor to 
American institutions; and those hyphenat¬ 
ed Americans who terrorize American poli¬ 
ticians by threats of the foreign vote are 
engaged in treason to the American Repub¬ 
lic. 


PRINCIPLES OF AMERICANISM. 

Now this is a declaration of principles. 
How are we in practical fashion to secure 
the making of these principles part of the 
very fiber of our national life? First and 
foremost let us all resolve that in this coun¬ 
try hereafter we shall place far less empha¬ 
sis upon the question of right and much 
greater emphasis upon the matter of duty. 
A republic can’t succeed and won’t succeed 
in the tremendous international stress of the 
modern world unless its citizens possess that 

I 


9 


form of high-minded patriotism which con¬ 
sists in putting devotion to duty before the 
question of individual rights. This must be 
done in our family relations or the family 
will go to pieces; and no better tract for 
family life in this country can be imagined 
than the little story called “Mother,” writ¬ 
ten by an American woman, Kathleen Nor¬ 
ris, who happens to be a member of your 
own church. 

What is true of the family, the founda¬ 
tion stone of our national life, is not less 
true of the entire superstructure. I am, as 
you know, a most ardent believer in na¬ 
tional preparedness against war as a means 
of securing that honorable and self-respect¬ 
ing peace which is the only peace desired 
by all high-spirited people. But it is an 
absolute impossibility to secure such pre¬ 
paredness in full and proper form if it is 
an isolated feature of our policy. The la¬ 
mentable fate of Belgium has shown that 
no justice in legislation or success in busi¬ 
ness will be of the slightest avail if the 
nation has not prepared in advance the 
strength to protect its rights. But it is 
equally true that there cannot be this prep¬ 
aration in advance for military strength un¬ 
less there is a social basis of civil and social' 
life behind it. There must be social, eco¬ 
nomic and military preparedness all alike, 
all harmoniously developed; and above all 
there must be spiritual and mental prepared¬ 
ness. 

SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC PREPAREDNESS. 

There must be not merely preparedness 
in things material; there must be prepared¬ 
ness in soul and mind. To prepare a great 


10 


army and navy .without preparing a proper 
national spirit would avail nothing. And if 
there is not only a proper national spirit but 
proper national intelligence, we shall real¬ 
ize that even from the standpoint of the 
army and navy some civil preparedness is 
indispensable. For example, a plan for na¬ 
tional defense which does not include the 
most far-reaching use and co-operation of 
our railroads must prove largely futile. 
These railroads are organized in time of 
peace. But we must have the most care¬ 
fully thought out organization from the na¬ 
tional and centralized standpoint in order 
to use them in time of war. This means 
first that those in charge of them from 
the highest to the lowest must understand 
their duty in time of war, must be perme¬ 
ated with the spirit of genuine patriotism; 
and second, that they and we shall under¬ 
stand that efficiency is as essential as pa¬ 
triotism ; one is useless without the other. 

Again: every citizen should be trained 
sedulously by every activity at our com¬ 
mand to realize his duty to the nation. In 
France at.this moment the workingmen who 
are not at the front are spending all their 
energies with the single thought of helping 
their brethren at the front by what they 
do in the munition plant, on the railroads, 
in the factories. It is a shocking, a lament¬ 
able thing that many of the trade unions of 
England have taken a directly opposite view. 
I am not concerned with whether it be true, 
as they assert, that their employers are try¬ 
ing to exploit them, or, as these employers 
assert, that the labor men are trying to gain 
profit for those who stay at home at the 
cost of their brethren who fight in the 
trenches. The thing for us Americans to 


ii 


realize is that we must do our best to pre¬ 
vent similar conditions from growing up 
here. Business men, professional men, and 
wage workers alike must understand that 
there should be no question of their enjoy¬ 
ing any rights whatsoever unless in the 
fullest way they recognize and live up to 
the duties that go with those rights. This 
is just as true of the corporation as of the 
trade union, and if either corporation or 
trade union fails heartily to acknowledge 
this truth, then its activities are necessarily 
anti-social and detrimental to the welfare 
of the body politic as a whole. In war time, 
when the welfare of the nation is at stake, 
it should be accepted as axiomatic that the 
employer is to make no profit out of the 
war save that which is necessary to the effi¬ 
cient running of the business and to the 
living expenses of himself and family, and 
that the wage worker is to treat his wage 
from exactly the same standpoint and is 
to see to it that the labor organization to 
which he belongs is, in all its activities, 
subordinated to the service of the nation. 

Now there must be some application of 
this spirit in times of peace or we cannot 
suddenly develop it in time of war. The 
strike situation in the United States at this 
time is a scandal to the country as a whole 
and discreditable alike to employer and em¬ 
ployee. Any employer who fails to recog¬ 
nize that human rights come first and that 
the friendly relationship between himself 
and those working for him should be one 
of partnership and comradeship in mutual 
help no less than self-help is recreant to his 
duty as an American citizen and it is to 
his interest, having in view the enormous 
destruction of life in the present war, to 


12 


conserve, and to train to higher efficiency 
alike for his benefit and for its, the labor 
supply. In return any employee who acts 
along the lines publicly advocated by the 
men who profess to speak for the I. W. W. 
is not merely an open enemy of business 
but of this entire country and is out of 
place in our government. 

You, Knights of Columbus, are particu¬ 
larly fitted to play a great part in the move¬ 
ment for national solidarity, without which 
there can be no real efficiency in either peace 
or war. During the last year and a quarter 
it has been brought home to us in startling 
fashion that many of the elements of our 
nation are not yet properly fused. It ought 
to be a literally appalling fact that members 
of two of the foreign embassies in this 
country have been discovered to be impli¬ 
cated in inciting their fellow-countrymen, 
whether naturalized American citizens or 
not, to the destruction of property and the 
crippling of American industries that are 
operating in accordance with internal law 
and international agreement. The malign 
activity of one of these embassies has been 
brought home directly to the ambassador in 
such shape that his recall has been forced. 
The activities of the other have been set 
forth in detail by the publication in the 
press of its letters in such fashion as to 
make it perfectly clear that they were of 
the same general character. Of course, the 
two embassies were merely carrying out the 
instructions of their home governments. 

Nor is it only the German and Austrians 
who take the view that as a matter of right 
they can treat their countrymen resident in 
America, even if naturalized citizens of the 
United States, as their allies and subjects 


13 


to be used in keeping alive separate nation¬ 
al groups profoundly anti-American in sen¬ 
timent if the contest comes between Amer¬ 
ican interests and those of foreign lands in 
question. It has recently been announced 
that the Russian government is to rent a 
house in New York as a national center to 
be Russian in faith and patriotism, to foster 
the Russian language and keep alive the na¬ 
tional feeling in immigrants who come 
hither. All of this is utterly antagonistic 
to proper American sentiment, whether per¬ 
petrated in the name of Germany, of Aus¬ 
tria, of Russia, of England, or France or 
any other country. 

RIGHTS AND DUTIES OF CITIZENS. 

We should meet this situation by on the 
one hand seeing that these immigrants get 
all their rights as American citizens, and on 
the other hand insisting that they live up 
to their duties as American citizens. Any 
discrimination against aliens is a wrong, 
for it tends to put the immigrant at a dis¬ 
advantage and to cause him to feel bit¬ 
terness and resentment during the very 
years when he should be preparing him¬ 
self for American citizenship. If an im¬ 
migrant is not fit to become a citizen, he 
should not be allowed to come here. If 
he is fit, he should be given all the rights 
to earn his own livelihood, and to better 
himself, that any man can have. Take 
such a matter as the illiteracy test; I en¬ 
tirely agree with those who feel that many 
very excellent possible citizens would be 
barred improperly by an illiteracy test. But 
why do you not admit aliens under a bond 
to learn to read and write within a certain 


14 


time? It would then be a duty to see that 
they were given ample opportunity to learn 
to read and write and that they were de¬ 
ported if they failed to take advantage of 
the opportunity. No man can be a good 
citizen if he is not at least in process of 
learning to speak the language of his fellow- 
citizens. And an alien who remains here 
without learning to speak English for more 
than a certain number of years should at 
the end of that time be treated as having 
refused to take the preliminary steps neces¬ 
sary to complete Americanization and 
should be deported. But there should be no 
denial or limitation of the alien’s oppor¬ 
tunity to work, to own property and to 
take advantage of civic opportunities. 
Special legislation should deal with the 
aliens who do not come here to be made 
citizens. But the alien who comes here in¬ 
tending to become a citizen should be helped 
in every way to advance himself, should be 
removed from every possible disadvantage 
and in return should be required under 
penalty of being sent back to the country 
from which he came, to prove that he is in 
good faith fitting himself to be an American 
citizen. 

PREPARATIVES TO PREPAREDNESS. 

Therefore, we should devote ourselves as 
a preparative to preparedness, alike in peace 
and war, to secure the three elemental 
things; one, a common language, the Eng¬ 
lish language; two, the increase in our so¬ 
cial loyalty—citizenship absolutely undi¬ 
vided, a citizenship which acknowledges no 
flag except the flag of the United States 
and which emphatically repudiates all dual- 


15 


ity of intention or national loyalty; and 
third, an intelligent and resolute effort for 
the removal of industrial and social unrest, 
an effort which shall aim equally at secur¬ 
ing every man his rights and to make every 
man understand that unless he in good faith 
performs his duties he is not entitled to 
any rights at all. 

The American people should itself do 
these things for the immigrants. If we 
leave the immigrant to be helped by repre¬ 
sentatives of foreign governments, by for¬ 
eign societies, by a press and institutions 
conducted in a foreign language and in the 
interest of foreign governments, and if we 
permit the immigrants to exist as alien 
groups, each group sundered from the rest 
of the citizens of the country, we shall store 
up for ourselves bitter trouble in the fu¬ 
ture. 


MILITARY PREPAREDNESS. 

I am certain that the only permanently 
safe attitude for this country as regards na¬ 
tional preparedness for self-defense is along 
its lines of universal service on the Swiss 
model. Switzerland is the most democratic 
of nations. Its army is the most demo¬ 
cratic army in the world. There isn’t a 
touch of militarism or aggressiveness about 
Switzerland. It has been found as a matter 
of actual practical experience in Switzer¬ 
land that the universal military training has 
made a very marked increase in social effi¬ 
ciency and in the ability of the man thus 
trained to do well for himself in industry. 
The man who has received the training is 
a better citizen, is more self-respecting, 
more orderly, better able to hold his own, 
and more willing to respect the rights of 


16 


others and at the same time he is a more 
valuable and better paid man in his busi¬ 
ness. We need that the navy and the army 
should be greatly increased and that their 
efficiency as units and in the aggregate 
should be increased to an even greater de¬ 
gree than their numbers. An adequate regu¬ 
lar reserve should be established. Economy 
should be insisted on, and first of all in 
the abolition of useless army posts and navy 
yards. The National Guard should be su¬ 
pervised and controlled by the Federal War 
Department. Training camps such as at 
Plattsburg should be provided on a nation¬ 
wide basis and the government should pay 
the expenses. Foreign-born as well as na¬ 
tive-born citizens should be brought to¬ 
gether in those camps; and each man at the 
camp should take the oath of allegiance as 
unreservedly and unqualifiedly as the men 
of its regular army and navy now take it. 
Not only should battleships, battle cruisers, 
submarines, ample coast and field artillery 
be provided and a greater ammunition sup¬ 
ply system, but there should be a utiliza¬ 
tion of those engaged in such professions 
as the ownership and management of motor 
cars, in aviation, and in the profession of 
engineering. Map-making and road im¬ 
provement should be attended to, and, as I 
have already said, the railroads brought 
into intimate touch with the War Depart¬ 
ment. Moreover, the government should 
deal with conservation of all necessary war 
supplies such as mine products, potash, oil 
lands and the like. Furthermore, all mu¬ 
nition plants should be carefully surveyed 
with special reference to their geographic 
distribution and for the possibility of in¬ 
creased munition and supply factories. Fi- 


IT 


nally, remember that the men must be sed¬ 
ulously trained in peace to use this material 
or we shall merely prepare our ships, guns 
and products as gifts to the enemy. All of 
these things should be done in any event, 
but let us never forget that the most im¬ 
portant of all things is to introduce uni¬ 
versal military service. 

But let me repeat that this preparedness 
against war must be based upon efficiency 
and justice in the handling of ourselves in 
time of peace. If belligerent governments, 
while we are not hostile to them but merely 
neutral, strive nevertheless to make of this 
nation many nations, each hostile to the 
others and none of them loyal to the central 
government, then it may be accepted as cer¬ 
tain that they would do far worse to us in 
time of war. If they encourage strikes and 
sabotage in our munition plants while we 
are neutral it may be accepted as axiomatic 
that they would do far worse to us if we 
were hostile. It is our duty from the stand¬ 
point of self-defense to secure the com¬ 
plete Americanization of our people. To 
make of the many peoples of this country 
a united nation, one in speech and feeling 
and all, so far as possible, sharers in the 
best that each has brought to our shores. 

AMERICANIZATION. 

The foreign-born population of this coun¬ 
try must be an Americanized population— 
no other kind can fight the battles of Amer¬ 
ica either in war or peace. It must talk the 
language of its native-born fellow citizens, 
it must possess American citizenship and 
American ideals. It must stand firm by its 
oath of allegiance in word and deed and 
must show that in very fact it has renounced 


18 


allegiance to every prince, potentate or for¬ 
eign government. It must be maintained on 
an American standard of living so as to 
prevent labor disturbances in important 
plants and at critical times. None of these 
objects can be secured as long as we have 
immigrant colonies, ghettos, and immigrant 
sections, and above all they cannot be as¬ 
sured so long as we consider the immi¬ 
grant only as an industrial asset. The im¬ 
migrant must not be allowed to drift or to 
be put at the mercy of the exploiter. Our 
object is not to imitate one of the older 
racial types, but to maintain a new Amer¬ 
ican type and then to secure loyalty to this 
type. We cannot secure such loyalty un¬ 
less we make this a country where men 
shall feel that they have justice and also 
where they shall feel that they are required 
to perform the duties imposed upon them. 
The policy of “Let alone” which we have 
hitherto pursued is thoroughly vicious from 
two standpoints. By this policy we have 
permitted the immigrants, and too often the 
native-born laborers as well, to suffer injus¬ 
tice. Moreover, by this policy we have 
failed to impress upon the immigrant and 
upon the native-born as well that they are 
expected to do justice as well as to receive 
justice, that they are expected to be heartily 
and actively and single-mindedly loyal to 
the flag no less than to benefit by living 
under it. 

We cannot afford to continue to use hun¬ 
dreds of thousands of immigrants merely as 
industrial assets while they remain social 
outcasts and menaces any more than fifty 
years ago we could afford to keep the black 
man merely as an industrial asset and not 
as a human being. We cannot afford to 


19 


build a big industrial plant and herd men 
and women about it without care for their 
welfare. We cannot afford to permit squalid 
overcrowding or the kind of living system 
which makes impossible the decencies and 
necessities of life. We cannot afford the 
low wage rates and the merely seasonal in¬ 
dustries which mean the sacrifice of both in¬ 
dividual and family life and morals to the 
industrial machinery. We cannot afford to 
leave American mines, munitions plants and 
general resources in the hands of alien 
workmen, alien to America and even likely 
to be made hostile to America by machina¬ 
tions such as have recently been provided 
in the case of the two foreign embassies in 
Washington. We cannot afford to run the 
risk of having in time of war men working 
on our railways or working in our muni¬ 
tion plants who would in the name of duty 
to their own foreign countries bring destruc¬ 
tion to us. Recent events have shown us 
that incitments to sabotage and strikes are 
in the view of at least two of the great 
foreign powers of Europe within their defi¬ 
nition of neutral practices. What would be 
done to us in the name of war if these 
things are done to us in the name of neu¬ 
trality ? 

Justice Dowling in his speech has de¬ 
scribed the excellent fourth degree of your 
order, of how in it you dwell upon duties 
rather than rights, upon the great duties of 
patriotism and of national spirit. It is a 
fine thing to have a society that holds up 
such a standard of duty. I ask you to make 
a special effort to deal with Americaniza¬ 
tion, the fusing into one nation, a nation 
necessarily different from all other nations, 
of all who come to our shores. Pay heed 


20 


to the three principal essentials: (1) The 
need of a common language, with a mini¬ 
mum amount of illiteracy; (2) the need of a 
common civil standard, similar ideals, beliefs 
and customs symbolized by the oath of al¬ 
legiance to America; and (3) the need of a 
high standard of living, of reasonable equal¬ 
ity of opportunity and of social and in¬ 
dustrial justice. In every great crisis in our 
history, in the Revolution and in the Civil 
War, and in the lesser crises, like the Span¬ 
ish war, all factions and races have been 
forgotten in the common spirit of Amer¬ 
icanism. Protestant and Catholic, men of 
English or of French, of Irish or of Ger¬ 
man descent have joined with a single-mind¬ 
ed purpose to secure for the country what 
only can be achieved by the resultant union 
of all patriotic citizens. You of this or¬ 
ganization have done a great service by your 
insistence that citizens should pay heed first 
of all to their duties. Hitherto undue promi¬ 
nence has been given to the question of 
rights. Your organization is a splendid 
engine for giving to the stranger within our 
gates a high conception of American citizen¬ 
ship. Strive for unity. We suffer at pres¬ 
ent from a lack of leadership in these mat¬ 
ters. 

Even in the matter of national defense 
there is such a labyrinth of committees and 
counsels and advisors that there is a tend¬ 
ency on the part of the average citizen to 
become confused and do nothing. I ask 
you to help strike the note that shall unite 
our people. As a people we must be united. 
If we are not united we shall slip into the 
gulf of measureless disaster. We must be 
strong in purpose for our own defense and 
bent on securing justice within our bor- 


21 


ders. If as a nation we are split into war¬ 
ring camps, if we teach our citizens not to 
look upon one another as brothers but as 
enemies divided by the hatred of creed for 
creed or of those of one race against those 
of another race, surely we shall fail and our 
great democratic experiment on this conti¬ 
nent will go down in crushing overthrow. 
I ask you here to-night and those like you 
to take a foremost part in the movement— 
a young men’s movement—for a greater and 
better America in the future. 

ONE AMERICA. 

All of us, no matter from what land our 
parents came, no matter in what way we 
may severally worship our Creator, must 
stand shoulder to shoulder 'in a united 
America for the elimination of race and re¬ 
ligious prejudice. We must stand for a 
reign of equal justice to both big and small. 
We must insist on the maintenance of the 
American standard of living. We must 
stand for an adequate national control which 
shall secure a better training of our young 
men in time of peace, both for the work of 
peace and for the work of war. We must 
direct every national resource, material and 
spiritual, to the task not of shirking diffi¬ 
culties, but of training our people to over¬ 
come difficulties. Our aim must be, not to 
make life easy and soft, not to soften soul 
and body, but to fit us in virile fashion to do 
a great work for all mankind. This great 
work can only be done by a mighty democ¬ 
racy, with these qualities of soul, guided 
by those qualities of mind, which will both 
make it refuse to do injustice to any other 
nation, and also enable it to hold its own 
against aggression by any other nation. In 


22 


our relations with the outside world, we 
must abhor wrongdoing, and disdain to com¬ 
mit it, and we must no less disdain the 
baseness of spirit which lamely submits to 
wrongdoing. Finally and most important of 
all, we must strive for the establishment 
within our own borders of that stern and 
lofty standard of personal and public neu¬ 
trality which shall guarantee to each man 
his rights, and which shall insist in return 
upon the full performance by each man of 
his duties both to his neighbor and to the 
great nation whose flag must symbolize in 
the future as it has symbolized in the past 
the highest hopes of all mankind. 


23 




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